When Does A Website Become Antique?

I was born when television became available for home use for the first time.  I saw my first color television broadcast of the world series standing on the sidewalk in front of a TV store watching through the window.  The grass was a kind of vivid green.  I was impressed.

Then, years later in college, I was working in the Physics Department at UCSD when they went from the IBM computer with its stacks of punch cards and purchased a "compact" computer.  As I recall it was called a PDP 18 or something like that and cost a lot of money.  It was so small it could sit on a table!

Early  in 1980 I sold an old car and took the $1800 and bought a Kaypro CPM computer.  I thought it was neat and spent hours typing code into its 6" green screen.  When it appeared that CPM was becoming obsolete, I hoarded all the software I could find.  Now that crap is in the dump.

My wife was the one who fell in love with Apple.  To me it was just the producer of the Beatles records.  She spent so much time at the Apple store I wondered if she was having an affair.  She was, and it cost me money.

The second I touched the Mac I fell in love too.  Then she gave me the phone.  The rest is history.

However, when the Kaypro went away I no longer felt the need to keep up with computer code.  Sometime in the 1960's I had studied Fortran but that was as useful as Latin.  So, around 1990 I asked the neighbor kid to create a website for me.  I gave him my ideas and some content and he posted wpatrickedwards.com.  It was very cool for 1990.

I printed it on my business cards.  Years passed.  Nothing changed.  It became an embarrassment since it was clearly old and dated.  But like much of my clothes, I refused to throw it away and get something newer.

About 5 years ago I found blogspot and started my blog.  It was easy and fun.  I could sit down when I was inspired and post copy, photos and videos.  I got a lot of satisfaction and positive feedback.  I still do.

But the old website remained online and I wondered how and when I would decide to kill it.

Then Patrice started to get involved in website design and video production.  We made some YouTube videos together and they were a hit.  He spent long hours after work creating a replacement for my original site.  I was not much of a help, as I had already decided that it was not worth it.  He persisted.

Just recently he began converting my magazine articles to a pdf format.  I was impressed and thought it would be great to post them on my blog.  It turns out you can't do that directly.  You need to link to a website which hosts the pdf files directly from the blog.  Who knew?

So I got excited for the first time in 25 years about wpatrickedwards.com and helped him with a bit of copy.  He was able to take down my old site and post the new one this weekend.  Wow!

Please visit wpatrickedwards.com by clicking on the first link on this blog page.  Look for the videos and pdf files.  I think you will be impressed by what he has been able to accomplish.  Except for some typos and small errors in the copy it is wonderful.  Of course the typos and copy errors are because I didn't take the time to proof read it...now that's my job.

I hope you like it.  You can thank Patrice for not giving up.